My Adventures in HubPages - Things I've Learned About SEO

Things I've Learned About SEO

One of the most overwhelming topics in the world of Internet
publishing
is Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to improve traffic for your site. Right here on HubPages there is no
end to the number of hubs devoted to the subject, and I think I spent
more of my first month at HubPages reading about this than I did actually
writing hubs!

One of the best reasons for writing here at HubPages is,
in my opinion, that a good deal of the SEO is built into the site - all
we writers have to do is take advantage of what HubPages gives us! Here are
just a few SEO tips you can use to get a good amount of search engine traffic without
really trying!

Use
tags

Tags on your hubs work like metadata
keywords on other web sites. They let Google know what your content is
about, so you want to use relevant keywords that relate to your hub as
your tags. You only need about 20 tags, and you should try and use
multi-word, or "longtail", keywords for
your tags. For example, if you have a hub about horses, a tag of
"horses" is too generic. Instead, use keyword phrases like "horse riding
for kids" or how to buy a horse" or "learn to ride a horse" - anything
that's related to your hub's content.

I use three methods for
finding keywords to use in my tags.

First, I do some
keyword
research using Google's AdSense Keyword Tool before I write the hub. I
enter a phrase or two about my topic, then look through the list of
suggested keywords for ones that relate to my content and have a high
number of monthly searches. I also try to incorporate these phrases into
the text of my hub.

Second, I use the suggested keywords
that HubPages provides
after I've
filled in all of my text capsules. Many of these will not be helpful,
so resist the urge to add them all!

Finally, after my hub
has been published, I go back to the Google Keyword tool and enter the URL of
my hub. If any good keyword phrases come back, I'll return to my hub and
incorporate them into the text and add them as tags.

One of the first hubs I wrote was in
answer
to the Ideabank question "How to
drink fast". I wrote a short little hub about a drinking game that I'd
played on a trip to Greece a few years ago. Today that hub gets regular
traffic, usually with search phrases like "best drinking game" and "how
to drink fast". These don't return my hub on the first page of Google,
but they do return the page for the question here on HubPages, and that
leads to my hub. That's the most effortless SEO for search engine
traffic that I can think of!

Use
Amazon capsule product names in your hub text

If you use
Amazon capsules to promote specific products, like "The Complete Guide To Affiliate Marketing", use the whole name of the
product within the text of your hub.

Within the text of my Zombie
Apocalypse hub I listed a GPS Navigation unit as an essential survival
tool, along with an Amazon capsule for a specific unit. That combination
led to my hub being returned on the first search result page on Google for the phrase "gps apocalypse"!

Use
keywords in your title and URL

The title you give your hub is very
important in regards of SEO techniques - HubPages
uses that title as both the HTML Title of the page and its URL. Google
gives high priority to HTML Page Titles and URLs, so using your keywords
there is vital to getting good search results. So if your hub is about
teaching kids to ride horses, and you found the phrase "horse riding for
children" in your preliminary keyword search, then a good title might
be "How To Teach Horse Riding For Children" or "Where To Find Lessons
For Horse Riding For Children". These may seem a little clunky, but the
closer you can get to the actual phrase the better. So "Horse Riding
Lessons For Kids" might sound better to you, but it won't be matched as
well by Google to the phrase "horse riding for children".

Also
note that once you publish a hub you cannot change the URL - the only
way to do that is to delete the hub and create a new one with the URL
you want. So picking the URL and title keywords should always be done before you
publish the hub! You can, however, change the title of the hub after it has been published.

If you have keywords that don't read well as your title, you can add them to the URL instead. For example, if you want to use the keyword phrase "how long to cook cookies" that won't make a very good title. But if your title is "How to Make The Best Cookies" and the URL "How-To-Make-The-Best-Cookies-How-Long-to-Cook-Cookies". Visitors will see the title, but most will not notice the clunky URL!

Write your own Summary Text

Before
submitting your hub, make sure to write your own Summary Text instead
of relying on what HubPages
automatically generates for you. By default, HubPages
will use the first few sentences of the hub, but if you can write your
own Summary Text you might be able to give a lot more information than
your first few sentences convey.

Use lots of capsules

When
writing your hub, you should break the text up into little "chapters,"
with a headline for each chapter. In addition to making your hub easier
to read, using multiple capsules with headlines helps Google figure out
what your content is about. Google gives a little extra weight to
"chapter" titles formatted with the <h2> HTML tag, and that is how
HubPages formats the :Capsule Subtitle" headings of your text capsules. By having useful headlines for each
"chapter" you let the reader know what to expect from each capsule and
you give Google a brief overview of your hub's content.

Use
the News and RSS
capsules

Google loves content that is up to date, and you
can create that affect without having to constantly update your content by using
the RSS
and News capsules. The text in these capsules is refreshed by HubPages
every time
the hub is loaded in a visitor's browser, so it will appear to Google
that your content is always fresh, even though the only thing that has
changed is the content of these two capsules!

Backlinking That Pays You!

Another of the
SEO
techniques I learned about is backlinking.
There are endless hubs here on HubPages about this topic, so I won't
go into extreme
detail here. Instead I'll share some of the best sources I've found for
backlinks. I now make it
a habit to use these sites right after I publish each of my hubs:

RedGage
- this was the first one I tried, and I've actually made almost as
much money over there as I have from AdSense. I initially signed up
because
they offer free backlinks from their PR4
site. I added all my HP links, then uploaded a bunch of photos from my
travels around the world. My second week there one of my photos was
featured on the homepage, and I got a ton of traffic and a $3.50 bonus!
If you decide to join RedGage, poke around and
get as many friends as you can - every time you add or edit anything on
the site, all of those friends will get an update, and that increases
traffic...Find out more about Using
RedGage To Get Free PR4 Backlinks and Earn Money Online!

SheToldMe
- this is a
PR5 site, and you need to submit an application to get an account. It's
pretty simple, but it took about 10 days before I got approved -
apparently the whole thing is run by one person, and she vets each
applicant to keep out the spam (and maintain that PR5!)

Baclinking

Digg -
this one
seemed promising until I got banned on the second day! They claimed in a
email that I had submitted "inappropriate content", but all the links I
had submitted were from HubPages, so they obviously weren't
inappropriate! I think it was actually that I posted too many links too
quickly (about 20 in two days), so if you go with Digg take it easy on
the number of
links you submit at one time. In the 48 hours or so that I was active, I
got 10 visits from them, so they're probably worth using...

StumbleUpon
- I just started using this site, so I don't know how good the links will
be. The fact that there's a link to StumbleUpon in the Share It section of every hub
makes it easy, though, so I use it.

Facebook
- I joined Facebook just to use it
for links, and I get a little bit of traffic from it. I don't really
like the way the whole site is setup, so I may not stick with it. But,
like StumbleUpon, it's built into the HubPages
Share It feature, so it's easy...

Pingates
- Again, I don't know how useful this one is, but it's fast and easy
and doesn't
require any registration, so I use it to submit links to a bunch of
different sites all at once..

Keeping Records Of Your SEO Attempts

I highly recommend keeping a
spreadsheet to track all of your backlinking!
Mine is simple - each hub has one line, with the hub name, the URL and
the summary text. Then I have columns for each backlink
site, with a number "1" in that cell if I used it for backlinking.
That way I can check the sum of each column to make sure I submitted
every hub to each source. Here's a screenshot of mine: